this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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[–] mirshafie@europe.pub 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Oh please. Female contraceptives have been available for 80 years. The first ones were extracted and slightly modified from yams.

We're now in a time where pharmaceutical development is in a space age compared to what it was 80 years ago. We've mapped the entire human genome, we can bioengineer bacteria to spit out custom molecules and proteins, we have freely available XRC 3d models of hundreds of thousands of proteins and their docking sites, we have (free) computational chemistry software that can do quantum molecular dynamics and supercomputers (but you only really need a fucking laptop), and the toolbox of organic chemistry is vastly larger than what it was in the 1950s.

The reason why no-one has come up with a safe and effective male contraceptive that can be anywhere near compared to existing female contraceptives is because it turns out to be fucking difficult.

[–] Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip -1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Scientists have only just started to use actual women to test treatment on, instead of dismissing them as more complicated males.

Like a month ago they just debuted the first woman sized crash test dummy. Turns out, there were some issues they'd been ignoring.

[–] I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

So, until recently, do you honestly believe that they just didn't test female contraceptives? Or do you think they tested them on males instead? Or maybe that argument is a little bit nonsense in this case because while women as a whole are underrepresented in medical testing, the idea that they never, ever, tested on women (especially in the case of drugs exclusively made for women) is a little bit of a ridiculous concept.

[–] mirshafie@europe.pub 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Don't try to pretend that treatments specifically for women are not tested on females.

[–] Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I'm not pretending anything. Women were rarely including in clinical trials up through the early 90s.

You're assuming I'm wrong because it's absurd. Yes, it was absurd.

[–] mirshafie@europe.pub -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You are correct that women were not included in clinical trials for general medications up until fairly recently, and this has arguably lead to slightly worse health outcomes for women. A very narrow group of young, healthy usually white men in their 20s have always been the primary labrats. Women were excluded not because they were forgotten, but because

  • The role of the young female is to churn out babies
  • The role of the young male is to risk and potentially sacrifice his life in service of others.

Absurd? Maybe. Just maybe.

Where you're wrong is your assertion that treatments specifically for women were not tried on women. Progesterone birth control go through the same clinical trials as any other treatment, but let's not pretend that they tried them on a bunch of young men and declared them safe and effective for women.